Chair: Professor Carol Harlow, Emeritus Professor of Law, London School of Economics

This essay presents the agenda for a new comparative research in the field of administrative law, with a focus on the European legal area. It has two main themes. The first concerns the use of the comparative method in this field. The second theme is the promotion of an advancement of knowledge with regard to an increasingly important part of administrative law; that is, administrative procedure. The essay is thus divided into two parts. In Part I, we argue that some difficulties that beset the traditional uses of the comparative method are even more evident when considering comparative approaches to administrative law and that, accordingly, a methodological shift is needed in more than one sense. First, instead of focusing either on similarities between national legal systems or on differences, both analogies and differences must be considered. Second, legal comparison, properly intended, differs from a mere juxtaposition of national administrative laws to their comparison. Last but not least, the over-emphasis on legislation is less and less justified in the current state of affairs, which calls for a careful attention to judicial, institutional and unofficial practices. In this perspective, we briefly illustrate the breakthrough methodology grounded on a factual approach that has been developed in the field of comparative private law in the last decades and the way we are going to apply it into our research on administrative law, which is viewed from a procedural lens. In Part II we discuss the main pillars that characterize our research: first, its goal, which is the advancement of knowledge; second, the choice of administrative procedure as the key issue; third, the combination of a synchronic comparison with a diachronic comparison, that is, a retrospective on some aspects of the history of legal institutions that look particularly relevant for our purposes; fourth, the selection of the legal systems to be studied, which includes not only a variety of national administrative laws, but also that of the EU.

Professor Giacinto della Cananea is Professor of Administrative law and EU Administrative Law at Università degli studi di Roma “Tor Vergata”. Professor della Cananea is a founding member of the steering committee of RENEUAL, the network on EU administrative law and was formerly a Visiting Professor at Yale Law School. He studied law at the law school Università di Roma “La Sapienza”, holds a PhD in European Law from the European University Institute of Florence (1994) and was awarded the Jemolo fellowship (Nuffield College, Oxford). His research is mainly in the fields of administrative law, EU law and comparative law, with a particular focus on how different legal systems evolve, facing similar problems, and interact, either directly or through “regional” and global regimes.